If there has ever been a more ham-fisted comic book movie than 1995's Judge Dredd, with its helmetless Sylvester Stallone and "comedy" sidekick Rob Schneider, I haven't seen it. Hollywood took the iconic British science fiction strip and did such unspeakable things to it that its producers deserve to be locked up in a Mega-City One isocube and forced to rewatch their hideous creation on loop for several millennia.

The forthcoming Alex Garland-scripted reboot, for which the debut trailer has arrived, sees Karl Urban as the titular lawman with Vantage Point's Pete Travis in the director's chair. The good news is that we're promised Dredd won't be removing his helmet this time, and the movie looks likely to hold truer to John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra's creation.

The slightly concerning news is that the film has had a pretty unorthodox production process during which Travis was reportedly locked out of the editing suite at one point while Garland, not previously known as a director, took it upon himself to wind things up. No one really knows quite what happened (bar, presumably Travis and Garland), or whose fingerprints will be on the final movie, but Travis hasn't taken his name off the film and Garland hasn't been given a co-director's credit. Make of that what you will (the pair's joint statement on the matter is here).

Dredd, as the new iteration is titled, certainly has a darker veneer than the Stallone version, though that's not saying much. I don't recall Lena Headey's Ma-Ma from the original comic books, though Judge Dredd has gone up against a number of matriarchal miscreants since debuting in 1977. Olivia Thirlby's Judge Anderson is presumably based on the "psi-judge" Anderson who appears both in Judge Dredd and in her own spin-off strip, but here doesn't appear to be exhibiting her trademark psychic powers. Nor is there a great deal of the searing satire that permeates the 2000 AD comic.

What we do appear to have is the sort of storyline that might have been wrapped up in a single episode of the strip, rather than one of the more epic tales that spread over several issues. Urban does an impressive, and entirely appropriate, Clint Eastwood impression as Dredd (Wagner and Ezquerra were thinking of Dirty Harry when they came up with the character), and Travis seems to have been reading the Zack Snyder guide to epic slo-mo.

For me, this Dredd has the look of a slightly po-faced take on Mega-City One – one conceived in 2008, when Christopher Nolan's stern and visceral The Dark Knight had driven all before it at the global box office – when a bit of big, brash and bold Paul Verhoeven-style razzmatazz might have been more in order. The comic books imagined a city in which everything that was wrong with 20th century America had continued to go wrong for another century or so, to the point where life was a great, gaudy cheeseburger of an experience which only the most extreme form of lawman had the sensibilities to govern. Dredd himself might have been a moody son of a gun, but the "perps" (criminals) he dealt with every day were always colourful and larger than life. With a bit of luck, we'll see more of this side of Mega-City One when the movie arrives in the UK on 7 September and in the US two weeks later.